Scaling your business quickly and effectively sometimes means that you need to turn to the professionals for assistance. In some cases, those professionals may specialize in financials or some type of business process. Other times, they focus on IT; which is exactly what managed IT services specialize in.
It’s no secret that driving an in-house IT team towards success takes a ton of time and effort whether you’re a small-to-medium sized business (SMB) or a large conglomerate that holds a prominent market share in your industry. Thankfully, no matter the size of your business or the size of your market share, you can leverage a managed IT service provider (MSP) to handle the work and the risk of IT services for your organization. Let’s review some of the top benefits of managed IT services for business and how you can supplement your organization with those services.
Why Do You Need Managed IT Services?
The right managed IT services for small business can help your company rest easy knowing that you have a professional team of experts to rely on for anything IT-related. If you ever find that your IT team isn’t as efficient as you would like them to be or you’re stuck having to lay off some of your IT team to make ends meet, it might be time to look into a managed IT service provider (MSP).
An MSP allows your team to focus on innovation and research instead of the mundane trench work that IT teams constantly get stuck in. Instead of having your in-house IT team manage your network updates, patches, support requests, and alerts, you can leave that to your MSP to carry out. It is because of these benefits that MSPs have grown increasingly more popular with businesses, with the market estimated to be worth $296 billion by 2023.
This leaves your company off the hook having to hire when you’re in an area of need. Especially since qualified cybersecurity experts that work well with your in-house team can be tough to find and secure, it makes more sense to hire an MSP instead of constantly worrying about hiring all the time. Let’s look at some more great benefits of MSPs for business:
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Saves Your Business Time and Money
Every business should look to take action that saves money and time because having control and the ability to predict IT spending is always good for business. Since in-house IT teams don’t come cheap, you can swap these unpredictable costs for fixed monthly costs by hiring an MSP.
Recruitment, training, and salaries cost significant sums of money. Case in point, large businesses spend, on average, about $6,400 per month per employee on IT solutions. Hiring an MSP can also remove many of your more excessive expenses and free your time up to become more cost-effective in your business operations.
This act of lowering your IT expenses for your business operations allows you to conserve your capital because you are taking advantage of a model that is subscription-based. The subscription-based model allows your business to pay only for the services you need on an annual or monthly basis, giving you more control over your IT budget. This gives you the freedom to scale back if business gets tough or ramp up if you have a big project or new IT component that needs to be implemented straight away.
Remote IT service providers can save you on IT costs such as licensing, training, as well as emergency repairs, which all add up in the short and long term. In essence, when you hire an MSP, you know that they have already made the investments in IT infrastructure, meaning that they assume all of the risks, so you don’t have to. This allows your in-house IT team costs to be more predictable.
These are the budgetary decisions that you can make to ensure that you can easily upgrade or replace a server without throwing off your entire budget. If you find that your unexpected costs are greater than you originally planned, then you can always scale back your MSP needs in the short term while you gather more resources to continue your scaling efforts. In the end, having an MSP handle your IT puts you in a great position to know what your costs will be from month to month, making budgeting much easier.
Best-In-Class Industry Compliance
If your company operates in the private sector, you know that how your data is stored and accessed is under great scrutiny at all times from various regulatory bodies. Regulations such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, or EI3PA govern how companies use data, complete financial reports, and more. Staying compliant with these regulations can be very costly to your business.
If you happen to overlook any of these regulations, your business is liable to be slapped with heavy fines for your negligence. Depending on the size and scope of your data breach, you could be looking at fines in the millions (or even billions).
Instead of putting your company at risk of non-compliance, it’s much easier to outsource your IT services to an MSP to ensure that this aspect of your company is handled by competent consultants who have sweeping knowledge of compliance for a wide array of industries? MSPs also stay well-read when it comes to compliance, making sure to stay abreast of complex and ever-changing regulations so that your team doesn’t have to focus on it.
Access to Exceptional Around the Clock Support
If your IT staff is starting to get stretched too thin because of one too many early morning IT emergencies, it might be time to look outside your organization for a solution to your IT woes. Instead of dealing with increased downtime on projects that lead to lower productivity across the organization (other departments can’t work if a part of the network is unavailable), you can remove the stress and potential for problems with an MSP.
An MSP has the tools and experience needed to monitor your systems 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Having the extra support of a remote IT service provider gives you a larger IT support system and helps you keep your business on track. MSPs manage critical areas of your operation which enables your business to stay ahead and curb any future cyber attackers from bringing down your IT department.
Having access to an MSP ensures that your organization will get the dynamic answers you need to solve your most complex IT problems at a moment’s notice. MSPs will also monitor, identify, and diagnose an IT issue before it escalates into a severe problem quickly, thereby reducing IT downtime and other expensive problems. By constantly monitoring your system, MSPs can catch warnings and handle them before a major problem develops, which improves productivity and keeps your network out of hot water.
Minimize Your Downtime While Staying Up-to-Date
Excessive downtime can literally stop your entire organization in its tracks. That downtime can cost your company up to $5600 per minute. When every second counts in your business, you need to turn to a team that can get the job done for you quickly and effectively.
Similar to a data breach, downtime can do more harm to your company’s reputation and trust with the public than you may think. Consider the possible scenario of being hit by a DDoS attack that leaves your network down worldwide at 2 am local time. If you’re operating on a skeleton crew of in-house employees, it may take 24 hours to get your network up and running again whereas an MSP could have you back in action well before the lunch bell rings.
As quickly as news travels these days, this could be perceived as a big win for your organization and help regain the trust of your customers in your platform. Of course, if you’re constantly having these issues where your MSP has to reactively save the day, your customers’ trust in your platform may begin to falter.
This is why keeping your system up-to-date with the latest software will keep your network from constantly being at risk for another cyber-attack. Thankfully, this is another area of expertise for an MSP, who can proactively make the changes needed to keep your system updated, thereby decreasing your chances of a surprise cyber-attack or unnecessary downtime in the future.
Drastically Improved Data Security
One thing about data security is that it’s always better to have more of it than you need than not have enough when you really need it. Of course, this is easier said than done for many organizations operating under bootstrapped budgets.
Since the average cost of a data breach for American companies is just a hair over $7.91 million, that most likely would represent a sizable chunk of available resources for a small business. Of course, these are just the direct costs. This doesn’t include the indirect costs that come from losing customers, vendors, board members, etc. which can cost your company in lost revenue and employee morale.
Unfortunately, cybercriminals aren’t going to stop anytime soon. Their army will continue to swell with other bad actors incorporating complex tools and techniques to try to breach your network to access your sensitive files, data, and more. With an MSP, you know where your data is going to be and that it is going to be there when you need it.
MSPs are quick to iron out a cyber response plan to identify and mitigate all threats quickly which helps to stymie the attack and salvage your data. The MSP’s plan will also include notifying the appropriate authorities in the event of a data breach. Lastly, MSPs can also assist you in training your employees to prevent a security lapse of great proportions.
Focus On The Core Tasks That Grow Your Business
Many small businesses often fall into the difficult transition from small, fledgling companies to mainstream businesses with an adequate level of market share in their industry. Taking this type of leap on limited IT resources can be incredibly daunting if you don’t have a plan of attack. That’s where an MSP comes in handy.
MSPs allow you to forget about your IT worries so that you can place your focus back on your primary business. This allows your employees to have more time to look at other large and demanding projects that have been neglected, but now are able to be completed. Once your in-house team sees how well your MSP supports your organization’s growth initiatives, they will likely get a residual boost in morale because they believe that the MSP is there to make their life easier.
A growing business may require you to delegate more IT tasks to your lower-level IT associates, but that might not be the best solution if you’re wanting the finished tasks to be of equal to better quality than you would personally perform. Instead of giving these employees an opportunity to fully focus on their most relevant or primary tasks, they end up reverting into roles that they don’t want to fill. If you want your employees to benefit from better time management and become more efficient, you should rely on a remote IT services provider who can take care of all your IT requirements.
Enhance Your Business’ Scalability
Working with an MSP allows small businesses to get the support they need to enhance their scalability as a business over time. In order for your business to grow unhindered, you need scalability as your demands go up or down. An MSP will also ensure that your IT needs are met by proactively exploring and identifying various enhancements that will lead to better support for your core objectives.
MSPs give you the ability to keep from having major investments, giving you access to an IT team that is capable of carrying out business initiatives quickly and effectively. This is great because after receiving the help and assistance from your MSP, you can then invest in expanding your IT services when your business is ready. That beats making a major investment and hoping that your company will grow into it. Contact RSI Security today for your managed IT services.